A humorous ghost story in which a particularly damp apparition appears on Christmas Eve.

“Far be it from me to be impolite to a woman, madam, but I’m hanged if it wouldn’t please me better if you’d stop these infernal visits of yours to this house. Go sit out on the lake, if you like that sort of thing; soak the water-butt, if you wish; but do not, I implore you, come into a gentleman’s house and saturate him and his possessions in this way. It is damned disagreeable.”

Performed by Susie Berneis.

Originally for sale on November 30, 2008, and released free with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License five years later. See the Mission page for why.

Probably the most famous of the ghost stories of M R James. Commissioned by Queen Mary for her doll house library, which is still on display at 1:12 scale in Windsor Castle. Performed by Susie Berneis.

Originally for sale on October 26, 2008, and released free with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License five years later. See the Mission page for why.

“In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant–a new Elephant–an Elephant’s Child–who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

Moti Guj Mutineer (1891)

“Once upon a time there was a coffee planter in India who wished to clear some forest land for coffee planting. When he had cut down all the trees and burned the under-wood the stumps still remained. Dynamite is expensive and slow-fire slow. The happy medium for stump clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant.”

Toomai of the Elephants (1894)

“Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones.”

Sometimes romance needs a bit of deliberation; this is Joyce at his most satiric.
“The Boarding House” is the seventh story in his collection Dubliners, classic tales dealing thematically with miscommunication, isolation, class differences, and emotional paralysis in Joyce’s Ireland.

Narrated by Alex Wilson.

Originally for sale on November 24, 2007, and released free with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License five years later. See the Mission page for why.